FBI comes looking for child porn, so man stabs his computer

If you're going to thrust a samurai sword into your computer, aim well.

When FBI agents burst into his bedroom on May 8, they found Kamil Mezalka standing in his underwear, clutching a two-handed samurai sword that he had just plunged into the side of his desktop computer. The feds were there to question him about 4,000 images and videos of child pornography they believed were linked to his account; Mezalka was apparently trying to destroy the evidence.

"More commands were given for Mezalka to drop the samurai sword, all of which Mezalka ignored and refused to obey,” wrote the FBI Special Agent who led the raid. “Mezalka began to remove the samurai sword from the computer as the law enforcement officers advanced on him in order to secure him and eliminate any potential danger."

The 21-year-old was wrestled to the floor, placed in handcuffs, and taken downstairs to sit on the couch. After Mezalka agreed to speak to the FBI without a lawyer, the agents “provided him clothing” and took him outside to their vehicle for a chat.

Welp.

Hunting "Wolfcarven"

The FBI had arrived at the house in Palm Coast, Florida thanks to the work of another FBI agent up in the Philadelphia area. On March 15, the Philadelphia agent used a publicly available file-sharing program to browse the files hosted by a user named “Wolfcarven," a user she had recently friended.

Wolfcarven had thousands of files in a shared directory with names that included words like “bedtime rape” and "lolita pedo." After downloading some of the videos and confirming their contents, the Philadelphia agent looked up the IP address used by Wolfcarven, subpoenaed AT&T for the subscriber account information, and found that it resolved to a home in Florida. The agent notified her colleagues in the Jacksonville, Florida FBI office a few days later.

On April 21, local FBI agents put the Palm Coast home under surveillance. They noted that the two-story brick home had a white garage door, a brick driveway, and a concrete fountain in the front yard—in addition to 3 vehicles in the driveway. The FBI queried the Florida Driver and Vehicle Information Database for all residents of the house and learned that a 21-year-old named Kamil Mezalka lived there with his mother and stepfather.

A Facebook image of Mezalka, with swords visible behind

FBI agent Jonathan MacDonald went back to the office to do his research. He learned that, three days after he had staked out the home, local cops had responded to a domestic violence call at the house. The police report from that incident said that Mezalka's stepfather was holding Mezalka's mother “down on a bed in the master bedroom, choking her with his hands.” When Mezalka heard his mother calling for help, he “broke into the master bedroom and confronted his stepfather with a samurai sword.”

So, when MacDonald went to the judge to request a search warrant, he knew he might be stepping into a volatile situation—and that samurai swords might be involved.

When he arrived at the home on May 8 to execute the warrant, officers knocked on the door and received no response. At that point, they executed a “mechanical breach of the door” and entered the home, shouting out their presence and demanding that occupants make themselves visible.

Mezalka appeared, saw the officers, and went back inside his second-floor bedroom. That's where the officers found him, hands clutching the samurai sword jammed into the side of his desktop computer.

Upon being questioned, Mezalka admitted that he was Wolfcarven and that he was attracted to young girls, but not too young: 13-18, he said. The agents escorted him back inside, arrested him, and then led him over to a forensic examiner who had accompanied them to the house. The examiner had gone through the stabbed computer's hard drive and located hundreds of images.

"I directed Mezalka's attention to the screen displaying the images of child pornography depicting toddler-aged children and I asked Mezalka how those images were on his computer," MacDonald wrote. "Mezalka glanced at the images and invoked his right to counsel."

Creative, yes; effective, no

Read enough search warrant affidavits involving computer crime and you'll eventually come across people who attempt to fold, spindle, and mutilate their data caches before the cops knock down their front doors. Usually this involves secure deletion utilities or hammers, but sometimes data destruction gets creative. One former member of LulzSec even told us that he bought a new laptop and that "everything else that could be incriminating has literally been burned."

But men in their underwear, wielding swords—that's a new one, strange even by the high standards routinely set in these kinds of cases. And it didn't even work.